Monday, July 10, 2017

Pnin
is the novel that most nearly reflects the life experiences of
Nabokov: as an émigré from Russia living in Europe, an immigrant to
America, and a professor at an upstate New York college. Pnin and Nabokov
are both possessed by an intense nostalgia for the Russia and St
Petersburg of their youth, and a revulsion for the totalitarian
regime that followed.

Vladimir Nabokov, lepidopterist

The
novel also allows Nabokov room to indulge some of his pet peeves,
such as psychiatry (Pnin‘s first wife is a psychiatrist). He lampoons
the ridiculous investigations that go by the name of research in
academia. This novel belongs to the campus genre, but its unique
feature is the character of Pnin. The reader will sympathise; Pnin is
not a fool but a victim, partly of his own eccentricities and
obsessions, and partly of the strange land in which nothing comports
with prior expectation.

Thommo & Pamela

There
is a rich vein of humour, accompanied by a quiet sadness, and
relieved by an optimism nowhere revealed as well as when Pnin meets
Victor, the son of his ex-wife. Pnin delicately welcomes him with a
football. Without any obligation he is going to take care of Victor's
pocket money at the expensive prep school.

Hemjith & KumKum

This
novel which Nabokov wrote as a sequence of stories for the New
Yorker magazine, beginning in 1953, became a successful English novel
when published by Doubleday in 1957. He was writing Lolita during
this time, and when that novel came out, Nabokov could give up his teaching
at Cornell (aka Waindell) and retire to the Montreux Palace Hotel in
Geneva to devote himself to writing, lepidoptery, and composing chess
problems, for the rest of his life.

Hemjith & Shoba

There
are many memorable quotes:

Some
people – and I am one of them – hate happy ends. We feel cheated.
Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam.

There
is an old American saying ‘He who lives in a glass house should not
try to kill two birds with one stone.’

Why
not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks,
the only thing in the world people really possess?

No
jewels, save my eyes, do I own, but I have a rose which is even
softer than my rosy lips.

The
evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

I
do not understand what is advertisement and what is not
advertisement.

Nine of us met to read the
novella Pnin by the Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov
— selected by Joe, Thommo, and Sunil. Nabokov's novel Lolita
was read long ago at KRG on April 30, 2007; it was perhaps the sixth
or seventh novel we read when ‘Bobby’ Paul George used to host
the readings of KRG at his bookshop called Just Fiction on
Pandit Karuppan Road.

Vladimir Nabokov made several journeys west to hunt for butterflies, while taking notes for what would become his landmark novel, 'Lolita'

Vladimir Nabokov writing in his car. He liked to work in the car, writing on index cards

Introduction to Pnin
by Joe

Vladimir Nabokov is one of
the illustrious non-winners of the Nobel prize. “In reading, one
should notice and fondle details, ” he said and you will come
across passages in all his novels that deserve a caress. Here is
Professor Pnin remembering how it was before his teeth were removed
for dentures:

“His tongue, a fat sleek
seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks,
checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom,
plunging from cave to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch,
finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft; but now not a
landmark remained, and all there existed was a great dark wound, a
terra incognita of gums which dread and disgust forbade one to
investigate. And when the plates were thrust in, it was like a poor
fossil skull being fitted with the grinning jaws of a perfect
stranger.”

There is a passage of
exquisite languor in Lolita in which Humbert Humbert watches
the nymphet playing tennis. Do you remember the dream sequence –

My Lolita had a way of
raising her bent left knee at the ample and springy start of the
service cycle when there would develop and hang in the sun for a
second a vital web of balance between toed foot, pristine armpit,
burnished arm and far back-flung racket, as she smiled up with
gleaming teeth at the small globe suspended so high in the zenith of
the powerful and graceful cosmos she had created for the express
purpose of falling upon it with a clean resounding crack of her
golden whip.

Nabokov was born in St.
Petersburg in 1899. Probably there is no other place in Russia home
to as many famous authors: Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky, and poets
such as Blok, Akhmatova, and Brodsky. The most loving memories of
what he called a perfect childhood in those environs are revealed in
his delightful memoir, Speak
Memory.

Nabokov Museum - former private home of the Nabokovs in St. Petersburg

He had difficulty
publishing his novels. Pnin was his fourth in English, and the
thirteenth novel of his career. The first chapter was published in
the New Yorker issue of Nov 28, 1953 while he was working on
Lolita and the whole of it appeared serially. The novel itself was
published in 1957 by Doubleday after being rejected by Viking as too
short, and by Harper for some other reason.

Pnin original page from the New Yorker Nov 28, 1953

It has many elements of
Nabokov’s situation when he migrated to America. He too was an
émigré, and had spent a period of his youth as an author writing in
Russian in Berlin and Paris for the émigré population after his
politically liberal family was forced to flee Russia. During a hiatus
he attended Cambridge University and graduated in 1922, rejoining his
parents in Berlin.

His wife was Jewish and
that made life difficult in the Germany of those times; so they
decamped to Paris first and then further south in France, until they
escaped altogether to America from Europe in 1940. He first taught at
Wellesley College in Massachusetts from 1941 to 1948. Nabokov landed
a berth in Cornell College in upstate New York where he gave his
course of Lectures
on Literature and Lectures
on Russian Literature in the fifties, later published. Many of
the architectural details in Pnin describe Cornell. He was in
the English Department until Lolita was successfully published in
Paris by Maurice Girodias at the Olympia Press in 1955, after being
turned down everywhere in America.

Lolita first edition by
The Olympia Press 1961

Lolita was a huge success —
50 million copies were sold by the time its fiftieth anniversary came around. In 1961 he withdrew to a hotel in Geneva to be near his son, Dmitri, who had
launched an opera career in Milan. He spent the rest of his life with
his beloved wife Véra at the Montreux Palace hotel.

Véra Nabokov was the love
of his life (he had many loves before his marriage). I quote
“She was his first reader, his agent, his typist, his archivist,
his translator, his dresser, his money manager, his mouthpiece, his
muse, his teaching assistant, his driver, his bodyguard (she carried
a pistol in her handbag), the mother of his child, and, after he
died, the implacable guardian of his legacy.”

Véra Evseevna Slonim married Vladimir Nabokov

She became all these
things and a person to whom he often listened; he disdained critics
in the real world outside. He was on intimate terms with the
unabridged dictionaries of at least two languages (English and
Russian), and knew French and German very well besides. In his
writing he did not distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar words,
always searching for the one that precisely expressed what he had in
mind. You can always find recherché words in his novels, such as
here vagitus, amphoric, volitation, cathetus
and calvity.

He was a lepidopterist
working at a high level, and for a while in 1941 he was at the
Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, devoting long hours to drawing
the wings and genitalia of butterflies. He published articles on
butterflies in professional journals even as a first-year student at
Cambridge in 1920. He said the one other profession he would have
chosen to devote his life to was lepidoptery; it was a passion he
retained all his life. He made discoveries in the field and framed
hypotheses that would be confirmed much later by DNA techniques. His
other interest was composing chess problems.

Nabokov as Butterfly Illustrator - A drawing of the wing of a Karner blue, a butterfly species that he discovered and named in 1944

He wrote ten novels in
Russian before 1939, and nine novels in English, besides some poetry.

He died in 1977. A bronze
statue by Russian sculptor Alexander Rukavishnikov stands in front of
the Montreux Palace hotel where he stayed from 1961-77. There’s
another in St. Petersburg State University.

Nabokov bronze statue by Russian sculptor Alexander Rukavishnikov in front of Montreux Palace hotel where he stayed from 1961-77

Here is what one of his
characters (Krug) said about death in the novel Bend Sinister:
Death is either the instantaneous gaining of perfect knowledge … or
absolute nothingness, nichto.

1.
Thommo

Chapter
1, Section 3 – As Pnin waits in the lecture hall in Cremona to be
introduced he sees a vision of his Baltic aunt, a dead sweetheart,
and friends from Russia long ago.

The
novel is to a large degree a nostalgic remembrance of the old Russia,
its culture, and scenes from a past never to be forgotten even as
Pnin struggles with the language of modern America and its hugely
different customs.

Hemjith particularly liked a sentence “The
evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.” This
is a send-off on the academic tendency to create lofty names for
courses in colleges, this phrase being the summation of a course
titled The Evolution of Sense.
As a novel in the campus life genre it is also a satire on life in
academia.

The travel to Cremona exposes the maladroit Pnin to all the
hazards of a foreigner planning his travel in a perplexing land and becoming
the victim of wayward impromptu help from strangers who mean well.

The reader participates in
the anxiety in this first instalment of the story: will the lecture
will be mislaid? the valise lost? or will Pnin reach in his pocket
and find he has brought the wrong lecture to the gathering? Nabokov
too was absent-minded and there is this famous
story of his Cornell days:

On one occasion he began
lecturing obliviously to the wrong class until he was rescued by a
student who had seen him entering the wrong lecture-room. (He dealt
with the mistake more suavely than Pnin would have managed, however,
saying before he left the room “You have just seen the ‘Coming
Attraction’ for Literature 325. If you are interested, you may
register next fall.”)

2.
Pamela

Chapter
2, Section 6 – Pnin's ex-wife Liza Wind lands up seeking a
subvention for her son to attend an expensive prep school

We
come across Liza Wind whom Nabokov creates as the type of a woman who
finds her destiny by skipping from one man to another, using each as
a foothold to climb higher and reach her next goal. Pnin was her
passport to America. KumKum said she was quite a woman. The kind of
woman who gets around, but in this case comes around, when she needs
help, said Joe.

Her
profession has Nabokov tearing into the mumbo-jumbo of psychiatry for
which he held a particular contempt, calling Sigmund Freud ‘the
Viennese quack’. Once in class he was vehemently denouncing Freud
when the heating pipes in his classroom began clanking and reached a
literally deafening pitch. Nabokov stopped and exclaimed: “The
Viennese quack is railing at me from his grave.” (Vladimir
Nabokov: The American Years,
Brian Boyd 1991, p. 308)

As
Pnin contemplates how Liza will be classified in heaven and whether
her creepy soul would envelop him, he comes across a squirrel needing
a drink and stops to become its ‘water father’ at a drinking
fountain; what a delightful aside, illustrating how Pnin fends off
all hurts in America.

After a brief discourse on
the various parts of the mouth used in pronouncing words in English
we get an introduction to English as spoken by newly arrived
Russians. Soon we see Pnin at his academic and playful best, noting for the benefit of his students that a phrase in the text for teaching Elementary Russian
is really the beginning of a Pushkin poem, and then we have a learned
aside on Pushkin he delivers to the class of naive students taking Elementary
Russian.

Pushkin was the poet whose famous poem Eugene Onegin
was translated in a highly accurate, but literal, way by Nabokov.
Pnin's obsessions are Nabokov's in many details. You can read Eugene
Onegin: Commentary and index

“Mr. Nabokov has not
merely rendered the most precious gem of Russia's poetic heritage
into limpid, literal poetic translation. He has given Pushkin's
wondrous lines the glow and sparkle of their Russian original."
– Harrison E. Salisbury, The New York Times

Joe clarified that
‘motuweth frisas’ stands for the days of the week, used in scheduling course lectures. The passage ends with a vision harking back to
Russia and circling to an amusement park in Berlin.

4.
Hemjith

Chapter 1, Section 2 –
Pnin recalls a desperate search for the key to the pattern in a
recurrent design of wallpaper when he was lying in bed with feveras a boy

Hemjith referred to Pnin
ruminating on his own plight in hospital as a sick boy, not having
any access to WhatsApp and other modern diversions. Thommo found it difficult to pass the time when he was recovering and would gaze at a
minute crack in the ceiling of St John's Hospital in Bengaluru
looking for an image. In the present day there is no time for
imagination to run its course. For Pnin it was the search for the key
to the wallpaper pattern that would reveal the cure for his sickness
and make him well again.

There is the analogous
story about how a fly on a ceiling helped René Descartes discover
cartesian coordinates, named after him. As he was sickly he usually
spent the morning in bed, not lazing, but thinking about this and
that, including Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am).
For the rest of the story consult this short instructive
video.

Pnin introduces himself to
Victor, Liza's son who has come over to spend some time with him.
Thinking the schoolboy must love football (not the American variety,
but soccer as they call it), buys him a ball – not knowing Victor is
allergic to physical sports.

The next question is how should Victor
refer to him by name. In Russia it would always be the name followed
by the patronymic, in his case Timofey Pavlovich, which means
“Timothy the son of Paul,” and one would keep both names even if
you were addressing old friends. But Pnin conceding that in America
first names (or even their shortening) are bandied about on first
meeting, allows that Victor should call him Tim.

Joe
narrated how when he first went to MIT he was horrified upon
encountering a graduate student, Peter Scope by name, who at a meeting with a
senior professor of physics (George
E. Valley, Jr) put his leg up on a desk and addressed the
professor as ‘George.’

Thommo
said in America there is such a thing as a Starbucks
name to simplify the recognition and pronunciation of difficult
names for Americans. For example, Ranen becomes Ron. Thommo had a
couple of examples of Indians who Americanised their names. Thus a
Malayali, name of Murali Nair, became Morley Nair. Joe gave an
example of a Malayali friend of his in Boston who upon landing
introduced himself to his professor as ‘P.P. Baby’; when the
professor inquired what P.P. stood for, he replied, Paul Parakkal.
Then and there the professor admonished him to drop the ‘Baby’
and change his name to Paul Parakkal!

The
Kerala cricketer, Sachin Baby, has been told by a commentator to grow
up ...

6.
KumKum

Pnin washes up after the
party — Chapter Six Section 13

KumKum loved the peaceful
scene as Pnin does the dishes after the party. The 'Boom-boom-boom,'
as he walks by the china closet is the sound of footfalls on a wooden
floor echoing from an open closet, KumKum said. The entire scene is
like a painting in words, so fresh with vivid particulars that Paul
Cézanne could have painted a still life titled Remains of a Party
after reading this passage. Thus:

A last drop of Pnin's Punch
glistened in its beautiful bowl. Joan had crooked a lipstick-stained
cigarette butt in her saucer; Betty had left no trace and had taken
all the glasses back to the kitchen. Mrs Thayer had forgotten a
booklet of pretty multi-coloured matches on her plate, next to a bit
of nougat. Mr Thayer had twisted into all kinds of weird shapes half
a dozen paper napkins; Hagen had quenched a messy cigar in an uneaten
bunchlet of grapes.

The inevitable happens. In
spite of the elaborate care Pnin hears ‘an excruciating crack of
broken glass’ and hopes the precious bowl Victor presented him has
not been not broken. It was intact! He was immensely relieved. Then he
goes to compose a letter to Professor Hagen who left telling him his stay at
Waindell might be in jeopardy.

Priya said the whole story
is more sad than funny, a capable academic struggling to maintain his
dignity in a new world where everything is strange and the odds are
stacked against him. KumKum knows many faculty at universities who having put
in their teaching and research for years fail to get tenure; it's
always sad but so long as the academic job market is good they can go
elsewhere.

7.
Zakia

Chapter 1, Sections 1,2
– Pnin travelling to his Cremona lecture finds himself in the
middle of a strange town.

Zakia took off from the
very first chapter where Pnin suffers the anxiety of missed train
connections to Cremona (stemming from his own assiduous homework
studying obsolete railroad timetables). They used to be called Bradshaw's
Railway Guide, often referred to in Sherlock Holmes and Agatha
Christie novels. Pnin lurches from one miss to another, and by the
end of this passage we must commiserate with him, stranded in the
middle of a strange town. This endearing balding professor we
conclude is a shlimazel as they say in Yiddish (someone who
attracts constant bad luck). It would have been Nabokov's fate too, but for his
constant protector and arranger, Véra Nabokov.

8.
Sunil

Chapter 5 Section 1 –
Nearly losing his way Pnin arrives in an old jalopy to attend the
bi-annual meeting of Russian émigrés at the The Pines, home of
Alexandr Petrovich Kukolnikov (Al Cook)

Pnin is just the kind of
academic who might learn driving by reading a Driver's Manual issued
by the state. One can't but laugh at the idea; the mental image of
Pnin as ‘he lay on his sick-bed, wiggling his toes and shifting
phantom gears,’ is quite risible. His rational argument with the
driving examiner about the stupidity of stopping at a Stop Light when
there is no traffic, leads to his failing the first driving test.

Regarding his quest for the Pines,
the venue for the meeting of émigrés, he ignores Alexandr
Kukolnikov's direction (Al Cook, that is!) and latches on to a gas
station attendant's peremptory declaration:

'You turn north and go on
bearing north at each crossing - there are quite a few logging trails
in those woods but you just bear north and you'll get to Cook's in
twelve minutes flat. You can't miss it.'

That was his mistake; of
course he misses it, and he gets lost and finds himself quite alone
in the woods, except for a ant, similarly lost, as Nabokov describes
it:

there was no living
creature in that forlorn and listless upper region except for an ant
who had his own troubles, having, after hours of inept perseverance,
somehow reached the upper platform and the balustrade (his
autostrada) and was getting all bothered and baffled much in the same
way as that preposterous toy car progressing below.

Using the geographic pole
for direction was quite common in the old days in Kerala, where everyone
was presumed to know which was south or west. Joe, for example, still
gives directions to their house for clueless delivery-men by saying
come to the Parade Ground (a well-known Fort Kochi landmark) and then
proceed due south from there along Napier Street.

Sunil said in Tamil Nadu
every busybody will get involved in giving you directions. In Andhra
they say ‘Leftu, leftu, leftu, rightu.’

9.
Joe

Chapter 6 Section 12 –
Hagen returns after the party to tell Pnin his future at Waindell is
uncertain

This is a conversation
between Pnin and the smooth America-adjusted Prof Hagen about his
impending departure for a better position at Seabord (university) and
the likelihood that Pnin won't find a home in the German department
any longer for his three poorly attended Russian courses. What to do?
The well-intentioned Hagen had considered taking Pnin along to
Seaboard but being rebuffed, and knowing that his successor, the
wretched Falternfels, won't brook Pnin, he suggests the next best
possibility. An old acquaintance of Pnin from his émigré days is
joining as Head of the Department in English, Vladimir Vladimirovich,
and he might host Pnin in the English department.

This is the second time
Nabokov inserts himself into the novel, the first being when he cites
Sirin among the Russian authors discussed at émigré gatherings (V.
Sirin was Nabokov's pen name when he was writing Russian novels in
Europe).

Pnin stands on
his dignity and won't be lobbed from one department to another like a
ping-pong ball. In the denouement we see him driving off in his
‘small pale blue sedan with the white head of a dog looking out
between two trucks’. The author Nabokov apparently thrusts himself
into the closing scene, and the narrator and the author become one.
Look up this article about Pnin
being full of allusions and literary duals.

The novel ends with Jack
Cockerell, current Head of the English Department, a constant mimic
of Pnin saying:

And now I am going to tell
you the story of Pnin rising to address the Cremona Women's Club and
discovering he had brought the wrong lecture.

It is instructive to hear
from Nabokov what he thought of the character Pnin he had created.
His view at first:

Sending the first story,
Pnin, to his editor at the New Yorker, Katharine White,
he wrote in a covering letter, “he is not a very nice person but he
is fun”.

When Nabokov was later
looking for a publisher for the completed book, serialised in the New
Yorker,he stressed other aspects of the character:

"In Pnin I have
created an entirely new character, the like of which has never
appeared in any other book. A man of great moral courage, a pure man,
a scholar and a staunch friend, serenely wise, faithful to a single
love, he never descends from a high plane of life characterised by
authenticity and integrity. But handicapped and hemmed in by his
incapability to learn a language, he seems a figure of fun to many an
average intellectual..."

And thus we leave him.

Readings

1.
Thommo

Chapter
1, Section 3 – As Pnin sits to be introduced at the lecture in
Cremona he sees a vision of his Baltic aunt, a dead sweetheart, and
friends from Russia long ago.

Some
people - and I am one of them - hate happy ends. We feel cheated.
Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its
tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only
unnaturally but unethically. Had I been reading about this mild old
man, instead of writing about him, I would have preferred him to
discover, upon his arrival to Cremona, that his lecture was not this
Friday but the next. Actually, however, he not only arrived safely
but was in time for dinner - a fruit cocktail, to begin with, mint
jelly with the anonymous meat course, chocolate syrup with the
vanilla ice-cream. And soon afterwards, surfeited with sweets,
wearing his black suit, and juggling three papers, all of which he
had stuffed into his coat so as to have the one he wanted among the
rest (thus thwarting mischance by mathematical necessity), he sat on
a chair near the lectern, while, at the lectern, Judith Clyde, an
ageless blonde in aqua rayon, with large, flat cheeks stained a
beautiful candy pink and two bright eyes basking in blue lunacy
behind a rimless pince-nez, presented the speaker:

'Tonight,'
she said, 'the speaker of the evening - This, by the way, is our
third Friday night; last time, as you all remember, we all enjoyed
hearing what Professor Moore had to say about agriculture in China.
Tonight we have here, I am proud to say, the Russian-born, and
citizen of this country, Professor - now comes a difficult one, I am
afraid - Professor Pun-neen. I hope I have it right. He hardly needs
any introduction, of course, and we are all happy to have him. We
have a long evening before us, a long and rewarding evening, and I am
sure you would all like to have time to ask him questions afterwards.
Incidentally, I am told his father was Dostoyevsky's family doctor,
and he has travelled quite a bit on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
Therefore I will not take up your precious time any longer and will
only add a few words about our next Friday lecture in this programme.
I am sure you will all be delighted to know that there is a grand
surprise in store for all of us. Our next lecturer is the
distinguished poet and prose writer, Miss Linda Lacefield. We all
know she has written poetry, prose, and some short stories. Miss
Lacefield was born in New York. Her ancestors on both sides fought on
both sides in the Revolutionary War. She wrote her first poem before
graduation. Many of her poems - three of them, at least - have been
published in Response, A Hundred Love Lyrics by American Women. In
1932 she received the cash prize offered by -'

But
Pnin was not listening. A faint ripple stemming from his recent
seizure was holding his fascinated attention. It lasted only a few
heartbeats, with an additional systole here and there - last,
harmless echoes - and was resolved in demure reality as his
distinguished hostess invited him to the lectern; but while it
lasted, how limpid the vision was! In the middle of the front row of
seats he saw one of his Baltic aunts, wearing the pearls and the lace
and the blonde wig she had worn at all the performances given by the
great ham actor Khodotov, whom she had adored from afar before
drifting into insanity. Next to her, shyly smiling, sleek dark head
inclined, gentle brown gaze shining up at Pnin from under velvet
eyebrows, sat a dead sweetheart of his, fanning herself with a
programme. Murdered, forgotten, unrevenged, incorrupt, immortal, many
old friends were scattered throughout the dim hall among more recent
people, such as Miss Clyde, who had modestly regained a front seat.
Vanya Bednyashkin, shot by the Reds in 1919 in Odessa because his
father had been a Liberal, was gaily signalling to his former
schoolmate from the back of the hall. And in an inconspicuous
situation Dr Pavel Pnin and his anxious wife, both a little blurred
but on the whole wonderfully recovered from their obscure
dissolution, looked at their son with the same life-consuming passion
and pride that they had looked at him with that night in 1912 when,
at a school festival, commemorating Napoleon's defeat, he had recited
(a bespectacled lad all alone on the stage) a poem by Pushkin.

The
brief vision was gone. Old Miss Herring, retired Professor of
History, author of Russia Awakes
(1922), was bending across one or two intermediate members of the
audience to compliment Miss Clyde on her speech, while from behind
that lady another twinkling old party was thrusting into her field of
vision a pair of withered, soundlessly clapping hands.

2.
Pamela

Chapter
2, Section 6 – Pnin's ex-wife Liza Wing lands up to seek a
subvention for her son who was attending an expensive prep school

I
have something to say to you of the utmost importance.'

Here
it was coming at last - so late.

She
wanted Timofey to lay aside every month a little money for the boy -
because she could not ask Bernard Maywood now - and she might die -
and Eric did not care what happened - and somebody ought to send the
lad a small sum now and then, as if coming from his mother - pocket
money, you know - he would be among rich boys. She would write
Timofey giving him an address and some more details. Yes - she never
doubted that Timofey was a darling ('Nu kakoy zhe tï dushka'). And
now where was the bathroom? And would he please telephone for the
taxi?

'Incidentally,'
she said, as he was helping her into her coat and as usual searching
with a frown for the fugitive armhole while she pawed and groped,
'you know, Timofey, this brown suit of yours is a mistake: a
gentleman does not wear brown.'

He
saw her off, and walked back through the park. To hold her, to keep
her - just as she was - with her cruelty, with her vulgarity, with
her blinding blue eyes, with her miserable poetry, with her fat feet,
with her impure, dry, sordid, infantile soul. All of a sudden he
thought: If people are reunited in Heaven (I don't believe it, but
suppose), then how shall I stop it from creeping upon me, over me,
that shrivelled, helpless, lame thing, her soul? But this is the
earth, and I am, curiously enough, alive, and there is something in
me and in life -

He
seemed to be quite unexpectedly (for human despair seldom leads to
great truths) on the verge of a simple solution of the universe but
was interrupted by an urgent request. A squirrel under a tree had
seen Pnin on the path. In one sinuous tendril-like movement, the
intelligent animal climbed up to the brim of a drinking fountain and,
as Pnin approached, thrust its oval face toward him with a rather
coarse spluttering sound, its cheeks puffed out. Pnin understood and
after some fumbling he found what had to be pressed for the necessary
results. Eyeing him with contempt, the thirsty rodent forthwith began
to sample the stocky sparkling pillar of water, and went on drinking
for a considerable time. 'She has fever, perhaps,' thought Pnin,
weeping quietly and freely, and all the time politely pressing the
contraption down while trying not to meet the unpleasant eye fixed
upon him. Its thirst quenched, the squirrel departed without the
least sign of gratitude.

The
water father continued upon his way, came to the end of the path,
then turned into a side street where there was a small bar of
log-cabin design with garnet glass in its casement windows.

The organs concerned in the
production of English speech sounds are the larynx, the velum, the
lips, the tongue {that punchinello in the troupe), and, last but not
least, the lower jaw; mainly upon its over-energetic and somewhat
ruminant motion did Pnin rely when translating in class passages in
the Russian grammar or some poem by Pushkin. If his Russian was
music, his English was murder. He had enormous difficulty
('dzeefeecooltsee' in Pninian English) with depalatization, never
managing to remove the extra Russian moisture from t's and d's before
the vowels he so quaintly softened. His explosive 'hat' ('I never go
in a hat even in winter') differed from the common American
pronunciation of 'hot' (typical of Waindell townspeople, for example)
only by its briefer duration, and thus sounded very much like the
German verb hat (has). Long o's with him inevitably became short
ones: his 'no' sounded positively Italian, and this was accentuated
by his trick of triplicating the simple negative ('May I give you a
lift, Mr Pnin?'

'No-no-no, I
have only two paces from here'). He did not possess (nor was he aware
of this lack) any long oo: all he could muster when called upon to
utter 'noon' was the lax vowel of the German 'nun' ('I have no
classes in afternun on Tuesday. Today is Tuesday.')

Tuesday--true;
but what day of the month, we wonder. Pnin's birthday for instance
fell on February 3, by the Julian calendar into which he had been
born in St Petersburg in 1898. He never celebrated it nowadays,
partly because, after his departure from Russia, it sidled by in a
Gregorian disguise (thirteen--no, twelve days late), and partly
because during the academic year he existed mainly on a motuweth
frisas basis.

On the
chalk-clouded blackboard, which he wittily called the greyboard, he
now wrote a date. In the crook of his arm he still felt the bulk of
Zol. Fond Lit. The date he wrote had nothing to do with the day this
was in Waindell: December, 26, 1829 He carefully drilled in a big
white full stop, and added underneath: 3 .03 p. m. St Petersburg
Dutifully this was taken down by Frank Backman, Rose Balsamo, Frank
Carroll, Irving D. Herz, beautiful, intelligent Marilyn Hohn, John
Mead, Jr, Peter Volkov, and Allan Bradbury Walsh.

Pnin, rippling
with mute mirth, sat down again at his desk: he had a tale to tell.
That line in the absurd Russian grammar, 'Brozhu li ya vdol' ulits
shumnïh (Whether I wander along noisy streets),' was really the
opening of a famous poem. Although Pain was supposed in this
Elementary Russian class to stick to language exercises ('Mama,
telefon! Brozhu li ya vdol' ulits shumnïh. Ot Vladivostoka do
Vashingtona 5000 mil'.'), he took every opportunity to guide his
students on literary and historical tours.

In a set of
eight tetrametric quatrains Pushkin described the morbid habit he
always had--wherever he was, whatever he was doing--of dwelling on
thoughts of death and of closely inspecting every passing day as he
strove to find in its cryptogram a certain 'future anniversary': the
day and month that would appear, somewhere, sometime upon his
tombstone.

"And where
will fate send me", imperfective future, "death",'
declaimed inspired Pain, throwing his head back and translating with
brave literality, '"in fight, in travel, or in waves? Or will
the neighbouring dale"--dolina, same word, "valley" we
would now say--"accept my refrigerated ashes", poussière,
"cold dust" perhaps more correct. And though it is
indifferent to the insensible body."'

Pnin went on to
the end and then, dramatically pointing with the piece of chalk he
still held, remarked how carefully Pushkin had noted the day and even
the minute of writing down that poem.

'But,'
exclaimed Pnin in triumph, 'he died on a quite, quite different day!
He died--' The chair back against which Pnin was vigorously leaning
emitted an ominous crack, and the class resolved a pardonable tension
in loud young laughter.

(Sometime,
somewhere--Petersburg? Prague?--one of the two musical clowns pulled
out the piano stool from under the other, who remained, however,
playing on, in a seated, though seatless, position, with his rhapsody
unimpaired. Where? Circus Busch, Berlin!)

4.
Hemjith

Chapter 1, Section 2 –
Pnin recalls a desperate search for the key to the pattern in a
recurrent design of wallpaper when he was boy with fever

Still more oppressive was
his tussle with the wallpaper. He had always been able to see that in
the vertical plane a combination made up of three different clusters
of purple flowers and seven different oak leaves was repeated a
number of times with soothing exactitude; but now he was bothered by
the undismissible fact that he could not find what system of
inclusion and circumscription governed the horizontal recurrence of
the pattern; that such a recurrence existed was proved by his being
able to pick out here and there, all along the wall from bed to
wardrobe and from stove to door, the reappearance of this or that
element of the series, but when he tried travelling right or left
from any chosen set of three inflorescences and seven leaves, he
forthwith lost himself in a meaningless tangle of rhododendron and
oak. It stood to reason that if the evil designer – the destroyer
of minds, the friend of fever – had concealed the key of the
pattern with such monstrous care, that key must be as precious as
life itself and, when found, would regain for Timofey Pnin his
everyday health, his everyday world; and this lucid--alas, too
lucid--thought forced him to persevere in the struggle.

It rained all the way. It
was raining when he arrived at the Waindell terminal. Because of a
streak of dreaminess and a gentle abstraction in his nature, Victor
in any queue was always at its very end. He had long since grown used
to this handicap, as one grows used to weak sight or a limp. Stooping
a little because of his height, he followed without impatience the
passengers that filed out through the bus on to the shining asphalt:
two lumpy old ladies in semitransparent raincoats, like potatoes in
cellophane; a small boy of seven or eight with a crew cut and a
frail, hollowed nape; a many-angled, diffident, elderly cripple, who
declined all assistance and came out in parts; three rosy-kneed
Waindell coeds in shorts; the small boy's exhausted mother; a number
of other passengers; and then - Victor, with a grip in his hand and
two magazines under his arm.

In an archway of the bus
station a totally bald man with a brownish complexion, wearing dark
glasses and carrying a black brief-case, was bending in amiable
interrogatory welcome over the thin-necked little boy, who, however,
kept shaking his head and pointing to his mother, who was waiting for
her luggage to emerge from the Greyhound's belly. Shyly and gaily
Victor interrupted the quid pro quo. The brown-domed gentleman took
off his glasses and, unbending himself, looked up, up, up at tall,
tall, tall Victor, at his blue eyes and reddish-brown hair. Pnin's
well-developed zygomatic muscles raised and rounded his tanned
cheeks; his forehead, his nose, and even his large beautiful ears
took part in the smile. All in all, it was an extremely satisfactory
meeting.

Pnin suggested leaving the
luggage and walking one block - if Victor was not afraid of the rain
(it was pouring hard, and the asphalt glistened in the darkness,
tarnlike, under large, noisy trees). It would be, Pnin conjectured, a
treat for the boy to have a late meal in a diner.

'You arrived well? You had
no disagreeable adventures?'

'None, sir.'

'You are very hungry?'

'No, sir. Not
particularly.'

'My name is Timofey,' said
Pnin, as they made themselves comfortable at a window table in the
shabby old diner, 'Second syllable pronounced as "muff",
ahksent on last syllable, "ey" as in "prey" but a
little more protracted. "Timofey Pavlovich Pnin ", which
means "Timothy the son of Paul." The pahtronymic has the
ahksent on the first syllable and the rest is sloored - Timofey
Pahlch. I have a long time debated with myself - let us wipe these
knives and forks - and have concluded that you must call me simply Mr
Tim or, even shorter, Tim, as do some of my extremely sympathetic
colleagues. It is - what do you want to eat? Veal cutlet? O.K., I
will also eat veal cutlet - it is naturally a concession to America,
my new country, wonderful America which sometimes surprises me but
always provokes respect. In the beginning I was greatly embarrassed
-'

In the beginning Pnin was
greatly embarrassed by the ease with which first names were bandied
about in America: after a single party, with an iceberg in a drop of
whisky to start and with a lot of whisky in a little tap water to
finish, you were supposed to call a grey-templed stranger 'Jim',
while he called you' Tim' for ever and ever. If you forgot and called
him next morning Professor Everett (his real name to you) it was (for
him) a horrible insult. In reviewing his Russian friends throughout
Europe and the United States, Timofey Pahlch could easily count at
least sixty dear people whom he had intimately known since, say,
1920, and whom he never called anything but Vadim Vadimich, Ivan
Hristoforovich, or Samuil Izrailevich, as the case might be, and who
called him by his name and patronymic with the same effusive
sympathy, over a strong warm handshake, whenever they met: 'Ah,
Timofey Pahlch! Nu kak? (Well how?) A vï, baten'ka, zdorovo
postareli (Well, well, old boy, you certainly don't look any
younger)!'

6.
KumKum

Pnin does the dishes
after the party — Chapter Six Section 13 (706 words)

From the sideboard and
dining-room table Pnin removed to the kitchen sink the used china and
silverware. He put away what food remained into the bright Arctic
light of the refrigerator. The ham and tongue had all gone, and so
had the little sausages; but the vinaigrette had not been a success,
and enough caviare and meat tarts were left over for a meal or two
tomorrow. 'Boom-boom-boom,' said the china closet as he passed by. He
surveyed the living-room and started to tidy it up. A last drop of
Pnin's Punch glistened in its beautiful bowl. Joan had crooked a
lipstick-stained cigarette butt in her saucer; Betty had left no
trace and had taken all the glasses back to the kitchen. Mrs Thayer
had forgotten a booklet of pretty multi-coloured matches on her
plate, next to a bit of nougat. Mr Thayer had twisted into all kinds
of weird shapes half a dozen paper napkins; Hagen had quenched a
messy cigar in an uneaten bunchlet of grapes.

In the kitchen, Pnin
prepared to wash up the dishes. He removed his silk coat, his tie,
and his dentures. To protect his shirt front and tuxedo trousers, he
donned a soubrette's dappled apron. He scraped various titbits off
the plates into a brown paper bag, to be given eventually to a mangy
little white dog, with pink patches on its back, that visited him
sometimes in the afternoon - there was no reason a human's misfortune
should interfere with a canine's pleasure.

He prepared a bubble bath
in the sink for the crockery, glass, and silverware, and with
infinite care lowered the aquamarine bowl into the tepid foam. Its
resonant flint glass emitted a sound full of muffled mellowness as it
settled down to soak. He rinsed the amber goblets and the silverware
under the tap, and submerged them in the same foam. Then he fished
out the knives, forks, and spoons, rinsed them, and began to wipe
them. He worked very slowly, with a certain vagueness of manner that
might have been taken for a mist of abstraction in a less methodical
man. He gathered the wiped spoons into a posy, placed them in a
pitcher which he had washed but not dried, and then took them out one
by one and wiped them all over again. He groped under the bubbles,
around the goblets, and under the melodious bowl, for any piece of
forgotten silver - and retrieved a nutcracker. Fastidious Pnin rinsed
it, and was wiping it, when the leggy thing somehow slipped out of
the towel and fell like a man from a roof. He almost caught it - his
fingertips actually came into contact with it in mid-air, but this
only helped to propel it into the treasure-concealing foam of the
sink, where an excruciating crack of broken glass followed upon the
plunge.

Pnin hurled the towel into
a corner and, turning away stood for a moment staring at the
blackness beyond the threshold of the open back door. A quiet,
lacy-winged little green insect circled in the glare of a strong
naked lamp above Pnin's glossy bald head. He looked very old, with
his toothless mouth half open and a film of tears dimming his blank,
unblinking eyes. Then, with a moan of anguished anticipation, he went
back to the sink and, bracing himself, dipped his hand deep into the
foam. A jagger of glass stung him. Gently he removed a broken goblet.
The beautiful bowl was intact. He took a fresh dish towel and went on
with his household work.

When everything was clean
and dry, and the bowl stood aloof and serene on the safest shelf of a
cupboard, and the little bright house was securely locked up in the
large dark night. Pnin sat down at the kitchen table and, taking a
sheet of yellow scrap paper from its drawer, unclipped his fountain
pen and started to compose the draft of a letter:

'Dear Hagen,' he wrote in
his clear firm hand, 'permit me to recaputilate (crossed out)
recapitulate the conversation we had tonight. It, I must confess,
somewhat astonished me. If I had the honour to correctly understand
you, you said -'

7.
Zakia

Chapter 1, Sections 1,2
– Pnin travelling to his Cremona lecture finds himself in the
middle of a strange town.

'I was thinking I gained
twelve minutes, and now I have lost nearly two whole hours,' said
Pnin bitterly. Upon which, clearing his throat and ignoring the
consolation offered by the kind grey-head ('You'll make it'), he took
off his reading glasses, collected his stone-heavy bag, and repaired
to the vestibule of the car so as to wait there for the confused
greenery skimming by to be cancelled and replaced by the definite
station he had in mind.

2

Whitchurch materialized as
scheduled. A hot, torpid expanse of cement and sun lay beyond the
geometrical solids of various clean-cut shadows. The local weather
was unbelievably summery for October. Alert, Pnin entered a
waiting-room of sorts, with a needless stove in the middle, and
looked around. In a solitary recess, one could make out the upper
part of a perspiring young man who was filling out forms on the broad
wooden counter before him.

Pnin left the station,
satisfied himself about the bus stop, and entered a coffee shop. He
consumed a ham sandwich, ordered another, and consumed that too. At
exactly five minutes to four, having paid for the food but not for an
excellent toothpick which he carefully selected from a neat little
cup in the shape of a pine cone near the cash register, Pnin walked
back to the station for his bag.

A different man was now in
charge. The first had been called home to drive his wife in all haste
to the maternity hospital. He would be back in a few minutes.

'But I must obtain my
valise!' cried Pnin.

The substitute was sorry
but could not do a thing.

'It is there!' cried Pnin,
leaning over and pointing.

This was unfortunate. He
was still in the act of pointing when he realized that he was
claiming the wrong bag. His index finger wavered. That hesitation was
fatal.

'My bus to Cremona!' cried
Pnin.

'There is another at
eight,' said the man.

What was our poor friend to
do? Horrible situation! He glanced streetward. The bus had just come.
The engagement meant an extra fifty dollars. His hand flew to his
right side. It was there, slava Bogu (thank God)! Very well! He would
not wear his black suit - vot i vsyo (that's all). He would retrieve
it on his way back. He had lost, dumped, shed many more valuable
things in his day. Energetically, almost light-heartedly, Pnin
boarded the bus.

He had endured this new
stage of his journey only for a few city blocks when an awful
suspicion crossed his mind. Ever since he had been separated from his
bag, the tip of his left forefinger had been alternating with the
proximal edge of his right elbow in checking a precious presence in
his inside coat pocket. All of a sudden he brutally yanked it out. It
was Betty's paper.

Emitting what he thought
were international exclamations of anxiety and entreaty, Pnin lurched
out of his seat. Reeling, he reached the exit. With one hand the
driver grimly milked out a handful of coins from his little machine,
refunded him the price of the ticket, and stopped the bus. Poor Pnin
landed in the middle of a strange town.

8.
Sunil

Chapter 5 Section 1 –
Nearly losing his way Pnin arrives in an old jalopy to attend the
bi-annual meeting of Russian émigrés at the The Pines, home of
Alexandr Petrovich Kukolnikov (Al Cook)

On a dull warm day in the
summer of 1954, Mary or Almira, or, for that matter, Wolfgang von
Goethe, whose name had been carved in the balustrade by some
old-fashioned wag, might have noticed an automobile that had turned
off the highway just before reaching the bridge and was now nosing
and poking this way and that in a maze of doubtful roads. It moved
warily and unsteadily, and whenever it changed its mind, it would
slow down and raise dust behind like a back-kicking dog. At times it
might seem, to a less sympathetic soul than our imagined observer,
that this pale blue, egg-shaped two-door sedan, of uncertain age and
in mediocre condition, was manned by an idiot. Actually its driver
was Professor Timofey Pnin, of Waindell College.

Pnin had
started taking lessons at the Waindell Driving School early in the
year, but 'true understanding', as he put it, had come to him only
when, a couple of months later, he had been laid up with a sore back
and had done nothing but study with deep enjoyment the forty-page
Driver's Manual, issued by the State Governor in collaboration with
another expert, and the article on 'Automobile' in the Encyclopedia
Americana, with illustrations of Transmissions, and Carburettors, and
Brakes, and a Member of the Glidden Tour, circa 1905, stuck in the
mud of a country road among depressing surroundings. Then and only
then was the dual nature of his initial inklings transcended at last
as he lay on his sick-bed, wiggling his toes and shifting phantom
gears. During actual lessons with a harsh instructor who cramped his
style, issued unnecessary directives in yelps of technical slang,
tried to wrestle the wheel from him at comers, and kept irritating a
calm, intelligent pupil with expressions of vulgar detraction, Pnin
had been totally unable to combine perceptually the car he was
driving in his mind and the car he was driving on the road. Now the
two fused at last. If he failed the first time he took his driver's
licence test, it was mainly because he started an argument with the
examiner in an ill-timed effort to prove that nothing could be more
humiliating to a rational creature than being required to encourage
the development of a Base conditional reflex by stopping at a red
light when there was not an earthly soul around, heeled or wheeled.
He was more circumspect the next time, and passed. An irresistible
senior, enrolled in his Russian Language course, Marilyn Hohn, sold
him for a hundred dollars her humble old car: she was getting married
to the owner of a far grander machine. The trip from Waindell to
Onkwedo, with an overnight stop at a tourist home, had been slow and
difficult but uneventful. Just before entering Onkwedo, he had pulled
up at a gas station and had got out for a breath of country air. An
inscrutable white sky hung over a clover field, and from a pile of
firewood near a shack came a rooster's cry, jagged and gaudy--a vocal
coxcomb. Some chance intonation on the part of this slightly hoarse
bird, combined with the warm wind pressing itself against Pnin in
search of attention, recognition, anything, briefly reminded him of a
dim dead day when he, a Petrograd University freshman, had arrived at
the small station of a Baltic summer resort, and the sounds, and the
smells, and the sadness –

...

Pnin had now been in that
maze of forest roads for about an hour and had come to the conclusion
that 'bear north', and in fact the word 'north' itself, meant nothing
to him. He also could not explain what had compelled him, a rational
being, to listen to a chance busybody instead of firmly following the
pedantically precise instructions that his friend, Alexandr Petrovich
Kukolnikov (known locally as Al Cook) had sent him when inviting him
to spend the summer at his large and hospitable country house. Our
luckless car operator had by now lost himself too thoroughly to be
able to go back to the highway, and since he had little experience in
manoeuvring on rutty narrow roads, with ditches and even ravines
gaping on either side, his various indecisions and gropings took
those bizarre visual forms that an observer on the lookout tower
might have followed with a compassionate eye; but there was no living
creature in that forlorn and listless upper region except for an ant
who had his own troubles, having, after hours of inept perseverance,
somehow reached the upper platform and the balustrade (his
autostrada) and was getting all bothered and baffled much in the same
way as that preposterous toy car progressing below.

9.
Joe

Chapter 6 Section 12 –
Hagen returns after the party to tell Pnin his future at Waindell is
uncertain

’First,' said Hagen, as
he and Pnin re-entered the living-room. 'I guess I'll have a last cup
of wine with you.'

'Perfect. Perfect!' cried
Pnin. 'Let us finish my cruchon.'

They made themselves
comfortable, and Dr Hagen said:

'You are a wonderful host,
Timofey. This is a very delightful moment. My grandfather used to say
that a glass of good wine should be always sipped and savoured as if
it were the last one before the execution. I wonder what you put into
this punch. I also wonder if, as our charming Joan affirms, you are
really contemplating buying this house?'

'Naturally, I am expecting
that I will get tenure at last,' said Pnin rather slyly. 'I am now
Assistant Professor nine years. Years run. Soon I will be Assistant
Emeritus. Hagen, why are you silent?'

'You place me in a very
embarrassing position, Timofey. I hoped you would not raise this
particular question.'

'I do not raise the
question. I say that I only expect - oh, not next year, but example
given, at hundredth anniversary of Liberation of Serfs - Waindell
will make me Associate.'

'Well, you see, my dear
friend, I must tell you a sad secret. It is not official yet, and you
must promise not to mention it to anyone.'

'I swear,' said Pnin,
raising his hand.

'You cannot but know,'
continued Hagen, 'with what loving care I built our great department.
I, too, am no longer young. You say, Timofey, you have been here for
nine years. But I have been giving my all for twenty-nine years to
this university I My modest all. As my friend, Dr Kraft, wrote me the
other day: you, Herman Hagen, have done alone more for Germany in
America than all our missions have done in Germany for America. And
what happens now? I have nursed this Falternfels, this dragon, in my
bosom, and he has now worked himself into a key position. I spare you
the details of the intrigue!'

'Yes,' said Pnin with a
sigh, 'intrigue is horrible, horrible. But, on the other side, honest
work will always prove its advantage. You and I will give next year
some splendid new courses which I have planned long ago. On Tyranny.
On the Boot. On Nicholas the First. On all the precursors of modern
atrocity. Hagen, when we speak of injustice, we forget Armenian
massacres, tortures which Tibet invented, colonists in Africa.... The
history of man is the history of pain!'

Hagen bent over to his
friend and patted him on his knobby knee.

'You are a wonderful
romantic, Timofey, and under happier circumstances... However, I can
tell you that in the Spring Term we are going to do something
unusual. We are going to stage a Dramatic Programme - scenes from
Kotzebue to Hauptmann. I see it as a sort of apotheosis.... But let
us not anticipate. I, too, am a romantic, Timofey, and therefore
cannot work with people like Bodo, as our trustees wish me to do.
Kraft is retiring at Seaboard, and it has been offered to me that I
replace him, beginning next fall.'

'I congratulate you,' said
Pnin warmly.

'Thanks, my friend. It is
certainly a very fine and prominent position. I shall apply to a
wider field of scholarship and administration the invaluable
experience I have gained here. Of course, since I know Bodo will not
continue you in the German Department, my first move was to suggest
you come with me, but they tell me they have enough Slavists at
Seaboard without you. So I spoke to Blorenge, but the French
Department here is also full up. This is unfortunate, because
Waindell feels that it would be too much of a financial burden to pay
you for two or three Russian courses that have ceased to attract
students. Political trends in America, as we all know, discourage
interest in things Russian. On the other hand, you'll be glad to know
that the English Department is inviting one of your most brilliant
compatriots, a really fascinating lecturer - I have heard him once; I
think he's an old friend of yours.'

Pnin cleared his throat and
asked:

'It signifies that they are
firing me?'

'Now, don't take it too
hard, Timofey. I'm sure your old friend -'

'Who is old friend?'
queried Pnin, slitting his eyes.

Hagen named the fascinating
lecturer.

Leaning forward, his elbows
propped on his knees, clasping and unclasping his hands, Pnin said:

'Yes, I know him thirty
years or more. We are friends, but there is one thing perfectly
certain. I will never work under him.'

'Well, I guess you should
sleep on it. Perhaps some solution may be found. Anyway, we'll have
ample opportunity to discuss these matters. We shall just go on
teaching, you and I, as if nothing had happened, nicht wahr? We must
be brave, Timofey!'

'So they have fired me,'
said Pnin, clasping his hands and nodding his head.

'Yes we are in the same
boat, in the same boat,' said jovial Hagen, and he stood up. It was
getting very late.

'I go now,' said Hagen,
who, though a lesser addict of the present tense than Pnin, also held
it in favour. 'It has been a wonderful party, and I would never have
allowed myself to spoil the merriment if our mutual friend had not
informed me of your optimistic intentions. Good night. Oh, by the
way... Naturally, you will get your salary for the Fall Term in full,
and then we shall see how much we can obtain for you in the Spring
Term, especially if you will agree to take off some stupid office
work from my poor old shoulders, and also if you will participate
vitally in the Dramatic Programme in New Hall. I think you should
actually play in it, under my daughter's direction; it would distract
you from sad thoughts. Now go to bed at once, and put yourself to
sleep with a good mystery story.'

On the porch he pumped
Pnin's unresponsive hand with enough vigour for two. Then he
flourished his cane and merrily marched down the wooden steps.

The screen door banged
behind him.

'Der arme Kerl,' muttered
kind-hearted Hagen to himself as he walked homeward. 'At least, I
have sweetened the pill.'

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Management - Learning from Experiences by Reflection
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